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Reserved Space for VirtualizationSun, 18 Mar 2018 07:01:24 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.3vmwarearenahttps://feedburner.google.comMicrosoft Updates replaces existing vmxnet3 vNIC on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/vmwarearena/~3/rHEGPsUcnaI/
Fri, 16 Mar 2018 06:37:16 +0000http://www.vmwarearena.com/?p=6137I noticed that one of my Windows Server 2008 R2 was not reachable yesterday and my first suspect was either my ESXi hardware was down because it is pretty old hardware. When I ping the ESXi host, it was reachable. Later, I have connected it to the vCenter to see the console of the VM. […]

]]>I noticed that one of my Windows Server 2008 R2 was not reachable yesterday and my first suspect was either my ESXi hardware was down because it is pretty old hardware. When I ping the ESXi host, it was reachable. Later, I have connected it to the vCenter to see the console of the VM. Summary of the virtual machine shows different IP address than my DNS registered one. I suspect someone would have changed the IP. When I logged into the windows, It changes my Static IP address to DHCP. When I try to reconfigure the IP address of the windows server 2008 R2 server back to its original IP. It throws up the error

” The IP address X.X.X.X you have entered for this network adapter is already assigned to another adapter (vmxnet3 Ethernet adapter) which is no longer present in the computer”

I have faced this hosted nic issue during P2V migration of Windows physical servers. It is not the case here. I didn’t make any changes to the windows servers. I just checked the windows servers for any patch schedule. It seems new Microsoft updates (Security Update for Microsoft Windows (KB4088875) was applied to my windows server on that day. Suspected the patch and searched on internet and twitter. Seems my guess was correct and many people reported this on the internet. Below are the details

On Tuesday, March 13th, 2018, Microsoft released a number of Security Updates for Windows Operating Systems. Two of these updates are now confirmed to be problematic: when applied to a virtualized Windows Server 2008/R2 and/or Windows 7 instances, these patches replace the existing virtual network card (vNIC) with a new one, hides the pre-existing vNIC and does not persist or transfer the existing IP Address configuration to the new vNIC.

4. Edit the properties of the new Network adapter and add back the existing IP address configuration. No reboot is required. The server will be back online after that.

That’s it. I hope this article will help you to understand the detailed procedure to fix this issue “The IP address X.X.X.X you have entered for this network adapter is already assigned to another adapter (vmxnet3 Ethernet adapter) which is no longer present in the computer” as a manual fix to recover your server quickly. Thanks for reading!! Be social and share it on social media, if you feel worth sharing it.

]]>We always need a tool to manage, monitor and troubleshoot VMware vSAN. Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) is one of the primary tools to manage and troubleshoot vSAN environment. The Ruby vSphere Console is a console user interface for VMware ESXi and Virtual Center.The Ruby vSphere Console comes bundled with both the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and the Windows version of vCenter Server. RVC is a programmable interface that allows administrators to query the status of vCenter Server, clusters, hosts, storage, and networking. For vSAN, there are quite a number of programmable extensions to display a considerable amount of information to manage and troubleshoot vSAN cluster using RVC. I will explain the some of the important commands to manage and troubleshoot vSAN cluster using RVC commands in this article. You can also manage and monitor VSAN using ESXCLI commands, Take a look at my article Monitor and Manage vSAN using esxcli vsan commands

How to Manage and Troubleshoot vSAN Cluster using RVC Commands

As we already discussed, There are quite a number of programmable extensions to display a considerable amount of information that you need to know about a vSAN cluster in the RVC (Ruby vSphere Console). We will see some of the important commands to manage and troubleshoot vSAN cluster using RVC commands.

How to Access RVC from vCenter Server appliance

To access Ruby vSphere Console (RVC), Log in to on your vCenter Server Appliance through SSH and run the below command and enter the user password if prompted.

Navigate to the data center for your vSAN environment and you can further navigate your cluster, host, VM and even VMDK of VM’s using CD command.

cd datacenter Name
example:
cd BLR-DC

You can use ~ to refer to your current datacenter, and all clusters are in the “computers” folder under your datacenter.

vsan.cluster_info ~cluster

This command prints cluster, storage and network information from all hosts in the vSAN cluster. It displays the complete information of all the hosts which are part of the vSAN cluster. It also shows the role of each ESXi host in the vSAN cluster

There are 3 types of roles Master, backup and agent. When a vSAN cluster is created, Each ESXi host in the vSAN cluster will be assigned to particular host roles in the vSAN cluster. These roles are for vSAN Clustering service only. The clustering service (CMMDS) is responsible for maintaining an updated directory of disks, disk groups and objects reside on each ESXi host in the vSAN cluster. This role is not responsible or related to handling objects and I/O.

This role allows nodes in the cluster to keep track of other nodes in the vSAN cluster. The clustering service is based on a master (with a backup) and agents. All the ESXi nodes in the cluster send updates to the master and then master redistributes them to agents. Electing master node is automatic and we don’t have control over on the election process.

In case of master node failure, backup node will hold all the information and this speed up the process of electing a new master node instead of all nodes resending their directory contents from their respective view of the cluster to the new master.

vsan.cluster_info ~/computers/vsanclustername/

vsan.apply_license_to_cluster

This command is used to apply a VSAN license to a VSAN cluster. The command runs against a cluster object and takes a license key as an argument.

vsan.apply_license_to_cluster {cluster} {-k, --license-key}

vsan.check_limits

This command displays resource information and is useful for ensuring that Virtual SAN is operating within its resource limits. The command runs against a cluster object. Check out my article to understand limitation and configuration maximum of vSAN 6.6

RDT relates to networking limits and Disks relates to storage limits. RDT is Reliable Datagram Transport and is the Virtual SAN network transport. RDT has a number of limits listed. These are Associations (Assocs) and Sockets. Additional information regarding Clients and Owners is also displayed.

vsan.check_state

This command performs 3 steps basically 3 tests on the vSAN cluster:
1.Check for inaccessible Virtual SAN objects
2.Check for invalid/inaccessible VMs
3.Check for VMs for which VC/hostd/vmx are out of sync

vsan.check_state ~/computers/clustername

Check for inaccessible Virtual SAN objects
This check performs the check for inaccessible vSAN objects. Inaccessible VSAN objects are an indication of the problem in the cluster. An invalid or inaccessible object is when the VM has objects that have lost the majority of its components or votes, again due to hardware failures.

Check for invalid/inaccessible VMs

This performs the check for any invalid or inaccessible VM’s in the vSAN datastore. This is likely due to the fact that the VM Home Namespace, where the .vmx file resides, is no longer online.

Check for VMs for which VC/hostd/vmx are out of sync

This step performs checks to ensure that the vCenter Server and the ESXi hosts are in agreement with regards to the state of the cluster

vsan.cluster_change_autoclaim

This command changes the disk auto claim mechanism. When enabled, Virtual SAN automatically claims any local, empty disks. If it is disabled, it does not claim disks automatically. It
takes a cluster object as an argument.

vsan.cluster_change_autoclaim -e ~/computers/clustername

Once I have enabled the auto claim for the vSAN cluster, Add disks to storage changed to “Automatic”. You can validate it from Web client under vSAN cluster properties.

vsan.whatif_host_failures

This is a very useful RVC command for determining if there are enough resources remaining in the cluster to rebuild the missing components in the event of a failure.

The HDD capacity reported below refers to the capacity layer, both for all-flash and hybrid. RC reservations refer to read cache reservations, an option that allows an administrator to dedicate a certain amount of read-cache to a virtual machine through VM storage policy settings, but it is only relevant to hybrid configurations as there is no read cache reservation setting in all-flash configurations.

vsan.enter_maintenance mode

This command Place a host into maintenance mode. It also provides the ability through the ‘-e’ option to evacuate powered off VMs, and also offers the three data evacuation choices that are offered to administrators when they choose to enter maintenance mode via the vSphere web client. These choices are:

vsan.disable_vsan_on_cluster

This command Disable Virtual SAN on the vSAN enabled cluster. It takes the cluster as an argument. Note that this command does not prompt for confirmation, but simply goes ahead and disables Virtual SAN. Use with command with caution.

vsan.resync_dashboard

The command will display the re-syncing of the components that are being rebuilt elsewhere in the cluster. Using this command, it is possible to tell how many bytes are left to sync for that particular VM/Object. The command displays an overview of the resync/rebuild for a snapshot in time.

To get a sense of resync/rebuild progress, either run the command multiple times or use the –refresh-rate parameter to display an updated table at a fixed time interval.

vsan.proactive_rebalance

This command initiates the manual rebalance that looks at the distribution of components around the cluster, and will proactively begin to balance the distribution of components around the cluster. Otherwise rebalancing only begins to occur when a physical disk reached 80% capacity.

Proactive rebalance is not running by default. An administrator will have to initiate the proactive balancing of components with the –start option

vsan.host_evacuate_data

This command is the data evacuation part of entering maintenance mode, but it does not do any of the compute/vSphere HA/etc. checks that one gets with maintenance mode. The command will evaluate the data on the host and ensure that VM objects are rebuilt elsewhere in the cluster to maintain full redundancy.

However, this can be overridden with the “–allow-reduced-redundancy” option, which evacuates the host but doesn’t initiate a rebuild due to lack of resources, i.e. a 3 =-node cluster. Another option is “–no-action”, which will run the command but not actually evacuate the host.

vsan.host_exit_evacuation

This commands exits the host evacuation state and allows the disks on the host in question to be reused for virtual machine objects. For this command to be successful, the host should be evacuated earlier as similar to the previous step.

vsan.upgrade_status

This command helps you to monitor the upgrade status of vSAN along with the details of the number of objects left to upgrade.You can also include the refresh interval to refresh the upgrade status during every interval. Below command will query the upgrade status every 60 seconds.

vsan.support_information

This command generates a support bundles that includes the output of many RVC commands. This is extremely useful to the technical support personnel (GSS) at VMware. Typically the Virtual SAN cluster will be provided as an argument to the command, but a vCenter or a datacenter may also be provided.

You should only run this command when requested by VMware technical support. The goal is to generate a comprehensive output that can be sent to VMware Support so that a lot of information provided in RVC is readily available to engineers at VMware as part of a support request.

vsan.support_information ~/computers/clustername

In addition to the above list of commands, We have few more commands to manage and troubleshoot vSAN cluster using RVC commands. I will explain that in the upcoming posts. I hope this is informative for you. Thanks for Reading!!!

]]>http://www.vmwarearena.com/manage-and-troubleshoot-vsan-cluster-using-rvc/How to Reset vCenter SSO password for VCSA Appliancehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/vmwarearena/~3/Nq8j6VEQF4I/
Wed, 07 Mar 2018 05:21:01 +0000http://www.vmwarearena.com/?p=6092It is always common that an administrator who has deployed and configured the environment leaving the organization and the new administrator joining the company is not aware of the password configured during the initial setup or even we tend to forgot the password configured by us. Most of the application will provide the option to […]

]]>It is always common that an administrator who has deployed and configured the environment leaving the organization and the new administrator joining the company is not aware of the password configured during the initial setup or even we tend to forgot the password configured by us. Most of the application will provide the option to reset or recover the forgot password. I will explain the detailed procedure to reset vCenter SSO password for the Appliance based vCenter Server (VCSA)

VMware vCenter is the management pillar of VMware vSphere. From vSphere 6.0, VMware Changes its vCenter architecture by introducing Platform services controller (PSC) by replacing vCenter SSO server. VMware Platform Services Controller (PSC) is a component of the VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite. PSC deals with identity management for administrators and applications that interact with the vSphere platform. You can either deploy both PSC and vCenter server in the same appliance (vCenter server with embedded Platform Services controller) or Separate appliance for PSC and vCenter Server (vCenter with External Platform services).

Since SSO is handled by PSC, You need to reset SSO password by logging (SSH) into PSC appliance in case of vCenter with external PSC else login with vCenter Server appliance if deployment is vCenter with Embedded PSC.

4. Press 3 to choose the Reset Password option. When prompted for the Account UPN, enter User@vSphere_Domain_Name.local
In my case, it is administrator@vsphere.local.

If your vSphere Domain name is customized, provide the customized domain name. A random password will be generated for the VCenter SSO admin account.

5. Log in to vSphere Web Client using the vCenter SSO admin account with the generated password. Select the Change Password option under the logged in Username

6. Specify the old password generated in the above steps and new password to change to. Click Ok. Logout and Login back to the vCenter server using SSO user account with the new password.

That’s it. We are done with reset vCenter SSO password for the SSO administrator. I hope this is informative for you. Thanks for Reading!!!. Be social and share it with social media, if you feel worth sharing it.

]]>VMWare vSAN is the VMware’s software-defined storage platform which delivers flash-optimized, secure storage. vSAN pools together server-attached storage to provide a highly resilient shared datastore suitable for any virtualized workload including business-critical applications, virtual desktops, Remote IT, DR and DevOps Infrastructure. VMware vSAN is the distributed layer of software that runs natively as a part of the ESXi hypervisor. Before implementing and troubleshooting vSAN, We need to understand the limitations and Configuration maximums of VMWare vSAN. It is very important to understand what vSAN can support and not support. In this article, I will discuss about the limitations and configuration maximums of VMWare vSAN 6.6.

Limitations and Configuration Maximums of VMWare vSAN 6.6

Limitations of vSAN

vSAN ESXi host cannot participate in the multiple vSAN clusters. However, a vSAN host can access other external storage resources that are shared across clusters such as Shared LUN from Storage array or iSCSI LUN’s.

Number of initiators who register PR key for an iSCSI LUN 64 (which as same as the number of ESXi hosts in vSAN cluster)

That’s it. I hope this article will help you understand the limitation and configuration maximums of VMWare vSAN 6.6. Thanks for Reading!!. Be social and share it in social media, if you feel worth sharing it.

]]>VMWare vSAN is the VMware’s software-defined storage platform which delivers flash-optimized, secure storage. vSAN pools together server-attached storage to provide a highly resilient shared datastore suitable for any virtualized workload including business-critical applications, virtual desktops, Remote IT, DR and DevOps Infrastructure. VMware vSAN is the distributed layer of software that runs natively as a part of the ESXi hypervisor. There are two types of VSAN cluster you can create one is Hybrid VSAN and another one is All-Flash VSAN. All-Flash vSAN was released with vSAN 6.0 but Hybrid vSAN available from the initial release of vSAN. In this article, We will discuss in detail about the Difference between Hybrid vSAN and All-Flash vSAN.

What is Hybrid vSAN?

The hybrid vSAN cluster can have up to 64 ESXi hosts and each ESXi hosts will have one or more disk group up to the maximum of 5 disk groups. Each disk group in the Hybrid vSAN should contain one Flash device (cache Tier) and one or more Magnetic disk (Max 7)(Capacity tier) to form a storage capacity. It provides optimal performance with 70% of flash used for read caching and 30% for Write cache from the cache tier. Magnetic disks will be purely used for capacity.

What is All-Flash vSAN?

All-Flash vSAN cluster can have up to 64 ESXi hosts and each ESXi host will have one or more disk group up to the maximum of 5 disk groups. Each disk group in the All-Flash vSAN hosts should contain one Flash device (cache Tier) and one or more Flash disk (Max 7)(Capacity tier) to form a storage capacity. All-Flash vSAN uses SSD Flash disks for both cache tier and Capacity tier. It provides High Performance and suitable for heavy I/O Workloads. Since both Cache and Capacity tier is Flash device, Entire Cache tier is used for write cache not utilized for read cache. In addition to that, RAID 5/RAID 6 Erasure Coding provides less space consumption as compared to RAID 1 available with Hybrid vSAN. In addition to that, Compression and Deduplication are only possible with All-Flash VSAN Cluster.

Difference between Hybrid vSAN and All-Flash vSAN

I would like to provide some of the important key difference between Hybrid vSAN and All-Flash vSAN in the tabular format. When comparing Hybrid vSAN with All-Flash vSAN, There are a lot of features such as Compression and Deduplication, RAID 5/RAID 6 Erasure coding are available with All-Flash vSAN. All-Flash vSAN purchase price is quite expensive as compared to the Hybrid vSAN. However all-flash vSAN delivered a superior price/performance by 26% by its storage saving mechanism and high performance. Take a look at this VMware Article. Let’s jump into comparing Hybrid vSAN and All-Flash vSAN.

That’s it. I hope this table with the difference between Hybrid vSAN and All-Flash vSAN is informative to you. Thanks for reading!!!. Be social and share it with social media, if you feel worth sharing it.

]]>http://www.vmwarearena.com/difference-between-hybrid-vsan-and-all-flash-vsan/How to Upgrade vSAN On-disk Format – The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guidehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/vmwarearena/~3/bD8bPhCmu8c/
Tue, 20 Feb 2018 05:29:59 +0000http://www.vmwarearena.com/?p=6040Once you have upgraded the vCenter server and ESXi hosts to the latest versions, You may need to upgrade vSAN on-disk format if required. For best results, upgrade the objects to use the latest on-disk format. The latest on-disk format provides the complete feature set of vSAN. It will be similar to Upgrading Virtual machine hardware […]

]]>Once you have upgraded the vCenter server and ESXi hosts to the latest versions, You may need to upgrade vSAN on-disk format if required. For best results, upgrade the objects to use the latest on-disk format. The latest on-disk format provides the complete feature set of vSAN. It will be similar to Upgrading Virtual machine hardware version after vSphere upgrade to enjoy the new features of the latest version of vSphere. vSAN on-disk format upgrade is optional. Your vSAN cluster continues to run smoothly if you use a previous disk format version.

Depending on the size of disk groups, the disk format upgrade can be time-consuming because the disk groups are upgraded one at a time. For each disk group upgrade, all data from each device is evacuated and the disk group is removed from the vSAN cluster. The disk group is then added back to vSAN with the new on-disk format. I will explain the detailed procedure to Upgrade vSAN on-disk format using vSphere Web Client and also via Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) commands.

How to Upgrade vSAN On-disk Format

We can upgrade vSAN On-disk Format using vSphere Web client and also Ruby vSphere Console (RVC)

Pre-requisites to Upgrade VSAN On-disk Format

1.Ensure that you are using the updated version of vCenter Server.

2.Ensure that all the ESXi hosts in vSAN Cluster are using the latest version of vSphere

4.Verify that all the disks and disk groups are in a healthy state. You can validate it via both vSphere Web Client and also via Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) for VSAN.

Execute the below command to validate the disk status of ESXi hosts in VSAN cluster

vsan.disks_stats ~/computers/cluster-name

To Validate the disk status from vSphere web Client, Select the vSAN Cluster from hosts and clusters view -> Configure -> Disk Management under vSAN. Click on Each ESXi host or disk group to check the heath of the Disks under disk group.

6. Ensure that ESXi hosts in the vSAN cluster are not in maintenance mode during On-disk upgrade. When any member host of a vSAN cluster enters maintenance mode, the member host no longer contributes capacity to the cluster. The cluster capacity is reduced and the cluster upgrade might fail.

7. Verify that you have enough free space in the vSAN Datatsore to perform the upgrade of vSAN On-disk format.

Run the RVC command, vsan.whatif_host_failures, to determine whether you have enough capacity to complete the upgrade or perform a component rebuild, in case you encounter any failure during the upgrade.

vsan.whatif_host_failures ~/computers/cluster-name

8. Verify that no component rebuilding tasks currently in progress in the vSAN cluster. You can validate it from both vSphere Web Client and also via vSAN RVC command line.

To check the status of Resync of components from RVC, Execute the below command

vsan.resync_dashboard ~/computers/Cluster-name

9. Validate the vSAN Health Check and ensure that all the Health Checks are green expect the warning for Disk Format Version under Cluster HealthCheck.

10. Run the Pre-Check Upgrade task before attempting to upgrade vSAN On-disk format. It will perform most of the validation for us. Ensure Disk pre-check is Green with the Status “Ready to Upgrade -Pre-Check Completed Successfully“.

If any errors reported during the Pre-Check, We need to fix that before attempting to upgrade On-disk Format.

Once all the Pre-requisites tasks are Completed, You can proceed to Upgrade VSAN On-disk format. This can be done with 2 different ways such as via vSphere Web Client and via Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) command.

The Ruby vSphere Console is a console user interface for VMware ESXi and Virtual Center. The Ruby vSphere Console comes bundled with both the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and the Windows version of vCenter Server. Most importantly, RVC is one of the primary tools for managing and troubleshooting a Virtual SAN environment. Let’s take a look at how to Upgrade vSAN On-disk Format using RVC commands.

Log in to vCenter Server appliance via SSH with root Credentials. To Switch to RVC from vCenter Server appliance, Execute the below command with SSO administrator username and password.

rvc administrator@vsphere.local@localhost
cd localhost
cd datacenter

Execute the below command to start the vSAN On-disk Format upgrade

vsan.v2_ondisk_upgrade ~/computers/cluster-name

Once the Disk format version Upgrade is completed, you can Validate the Disk Format version from General settings of VSAN.

Once the upgrade is completed, we can validate that the vSAN objects versions. Run the below command to validate:

vsan.obj_status_report ~/computers/cluster-name

Upgrade VSAN On-disk format (3 node VSAN Cluster)

If you upgrade a vSAN cluster with three hosts, and you want to perform a full evacuation, the evacuation fails for objects with a Primary level of failures to tolerate greater than zero.

A three-host cluster cannot reprotect a disk group that is being fully evacuated using the resources of only two hosts. For example, when the Primary level of failures to tolerate is set to 1, vSAN requires three protection components (two mirrors and a witness), where each protection component is placed on a separate host.

For a three-host cluster, you must choose the Ensure data accessibility evacuation mode. When in this mode, any hardware failure might result in data loss.

When upgrading a three-host cluster or when upgrading a cluster with limited resources, allow the virtual machines to operate in a reduced redundancy mode. Run the RVC command with the option:

vsan.ondisk_upgrade --allow-reduced-redundancy

Using the –allow-reduced-redundancy command option means that certain virtual machines might be unable to tolerate failures during the migration. This lowered tolerance for failure also can cause data loss. vSAN restores full compliance and redundancy after the upgrade is completed.

During the upgrade, the compliance status of virtual machines and their redundancies is temporarily non-compliant. After you complete the upgrade and finish all rebuild tasks, the virtual machines will become compliant. For more information take a look at VMware article.

That’s it. I hope it helps you to understand the procedure to upgrade vSAN On-disk upgrade procedure. Thanks for Reading!!!. Be social and share it with social media, if you feel worth sharing it.

]]>http://www.vmwarearena.com/upgrade-vsan-on-disk-format/How to Monitor vSphere Replication with vCenter Alarmshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/vmwarearena/~3/teajAHFwiGU/
Fri, 16 Feb 2018 23:00:47 +0000http://www.vmwarearena.com/?p=6024vSphere Replication is a host-based virtual machine (VM) replication solution that works with nearly any storage type supported by VMware vSphere. To automate the recovery of multiple vSphere Replication replicated virtual machines, we can make use of VMware Site Recovery Manager. I have already explained the procedure to install, configure, recover and reprotect replication for virtual machines using […]

]]>vSphere Replication is a host-based virtual machine (VM) replication solution that works with nearly any storage type supported by VMware vSphere. To automate the recovery of multiple vSphere Replication replicated virtual machines, we can make use of VMware Site Recovery Manager. I have already explained the procedure to install, configure, recover and reprotect replication for virtual machines using vSphere Replication. Even though most of the tasks are completed, Our job is not yet completed until we configure monitoring and alert mechanism. It is very important to configure monitoring and alerts for any implementations. In this article, I will explain how to Monitor vSphere Replication with vCenter Alarms.

vCenter Alarms are notifications that occur in response to selected events, conditions, and states that occur with objects in the inventory. You use the vSphereWeb Client to create and modify alarms.

vCenter server will have a set of predefined alarms to monitor clusters, hosts, datacenters, datastores, networks, virtual machine and also to monitor vCenter server licensing

How to Monitor vSphere Replication using vCenter Alarms

Specify the Alarm Name for the alarm definition. Select “Virtual Machines” from Monitor drop-down. Select “Specific event occurring on this object”. Select the checkbox“Enabled this alarm”. Click Next.

Monitoring RPO violation of replicated virtual machines is one of the important alarm definitions to monitor virtual machine RPO requirement. So I will explain the procedure to configure an alarm for RPO Violated.

To add an RPO violated event, Click on the + symbol to add an event and Select “RPO violated” from the drop-down.

You can also optionally add RPO restored event also. Click on Next.

You can specify multiple actions to take when the alarm state changes. I am going to configure “Send a notification email” as action when the “RPO violated” alarm definition is triggered.

Select “send a Notification email” from the drop-down

Specify the email address to send the notification email when the alarm is triggered. Click Finish.

Select the reoccurrence of the email alerts. Select Once or Repeat from the drop-down. If you want to Repeat the alarm, Specify the seconds to repeat after every schedule. Click Finish.

Alarm definition is created and it will appear under the Alarm definition.

Similar to that, We have multiple vSphere Replication related events such as Replication Configuration issues, Virtual machine recovery states, vSphere Replication server connection, alarms related to VM Synchronization, modification to replication configuration, etc which we can monitor vSphere Replication using vCenter Alarms. Take a look at the VMware article to get the complete list of vSphere Replication related events and alarms

Events related to VM Sync status.

Events related to vSphere Replication configuration.

Events related to vSphere Replication server connection. This will be available under Monitor object “vCenter” and not on the Virtual machine.

That’s it. I hope this article helps you to understand the alarms related to vSphere replication and how to monitor vSphere Replication using vCenter Alarms. Thanks for Reading!!!. Be social and share it with social media, if you feel worth sharing it.

]]>http://www.vmwarearena.com/monitor-vsphere-replication-vcenter-alarms/How to Create All-Flash vSAN Disk Group -Step By Stephttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/vmwarearena/~3/TZmyVpqVIEs/
Fri, 16 Feb 2018 07:13:12 +0000http://www.vmwarearena.com/?p=6011When you enable vSAN on a cluster, choose a disk-claiming mode to organize devices into disk groups. Disk-claiming method is either Manual or Automatic. vSAN 6.6 and later releases have a uniform workflow for claiming disks across all scenarios. It groups all available disks by model and size, or by the host. You must select […]

]]>When you enable vSAN on a cluster, choose a disk-claiming mode to organize devices into disk groups. Disk-claiming method is either Manual or Automatic. vSAN 6.6 and later releases have a uniform workflow for claiming disks across all scenarios. It groups all available disks by model and size, or by the host. You must select which devices to use for cache and which to use for capacity. We also aware that we have two types of vSAN deployments which is Hybrid and All-Flash VSAN. Hybrid vSAN should contain at least one Flash disk (SSD) for cache tier and one or more Hard disk for Capacity tier but in the All-Flash vSAN, both cache and capacity tier needs a Flash Device. In this article, I will explain the detailed step by step procedure to create All-Flash VSAN disk group.

To create an All-Flash vSAN disk group, We must define the disk group and individually select devices to be included as part of the disk group. When you create a disk group, You should consider the ratio of flash cache to consumed capacity. We should consider at least 10% of flash cache to consumed capacity ratio. For example, If capacity disk consumes around 10 TB then consider using 1 TB for cache tier.

How to Create All-Flash vSAN Disk Group

Log in to vCenter Server using vSphere Web Client. Before creating All-Flash VSAN disk group, validate that all the disks are appearing under the ESXi hosts -> Storage Devices. I can all 3 Flash (SSD) disks are appearing under my ESXi hosts. I have validated the disks in all the ESXi hosts which will be part of the vSAN cluster.

Select one flash device to serve as Cache tier. From the Capacity type drop-down menu, select the type of capacity disks to use, depending on the type of disk group you want to create (HDD for hybrid or Flash for all-flash). Since I am creating All-Flash vSAN, Select Flash from the drop-down.

Select one or disks from the list which you want to use for Capacity. Click Ok.

Disk group is created for one of the ESXi hosts in the vSAN cluster. You can create up to the maximum of 5 disk groups per ESXi host in the vSAN cluster. Similar to that, Create the disk group for each of the ESXi hosts in the VSAN cluster.

I have 4 ESXi hosts in the cluster and created All-Flash VSAN disk group on each of the hosts.

When you start to create disk groups on each host and add cache and capacity devices, the size of the VSAN datastore increases according to the amount of physical capacity added by those devices. vSAN creates a single distributed vSAN datastore using the local empty capacity available from the hosts added to the cluster. I can see the vSAN datastore is created for the vSAN cluster.

That’ it. We are done with creating All-Flash VSAN disk group. I hope this is informative for you. Thanks for Reading!!!. Be social and share it with social media, if you feel worth sharing it.

]]>http://www.vmwarearena.com/create-all-flash-vsan-disk-group/How to Mark HardDisk as Flash Disk for vSAN Disk Grouphttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/vmwarearena/~3/YoBRtLFPrDs/
Thu, 15 Feb 2018 07:50:28 +0000http://www.vmwarearena.com/?p=6004As you aware that, Hybrid vSAN cluster needs at least one Flash disk (SSD) in each disk group of the ESXi host for cache tier and HDD disk can be used under capacity tier. For All-flash vSAN cluster, all the disks need to be Flash disk. There are some situations Flash devices might not be recognized […]

]]>As you aware that, Hybrid vSAN cluster needs at least one Flash disk (SSD) in each disk group of the ESXi host for cache tier and HDD disk can be used under capacity tier. For All-flash vSAN cluster, all the disks need to be Flash disk. There are some situations Flash devices might not be recognized as the flash when they are enabled for RAID 0 mode rather than passthrough mode. When devices are not recognized as the local flash, they are excluded from the list of devices offered for vSAN and you cannot use them in the vSAN cluster. Marking these devices as local flash makes them available to vSAN. When flash devices are not automatically identified as flash by ESXi hosts, you can manually mark Harddisk as flash disk.

This option will be extremely useful for the lab setup. In the home lab, it is not easy to afford for Flash disk to test the VSAN home lab setup. In that case, We can mark the local HDD Harddisk as Flash device to able to add it as Flash disk under cache tier for VSAN disk group.

Make sure that the virtual machine accessing the device is power off and the datastore is unmounted, if any

How to Mark HardDisk as Flash Disk

Log in to vCenter Server using vSphere Web Client. Navigate towards to the ESXi host ->Configure -> Storage Device -> Select the HDD disk which you want to mark as Flash from the list and Click the “F” (Flash disk) icon to mark the selected disk as Flash.

Click Yes to Confirm Mark Hard disk as Flash Disk. Marking HDD disks as flash disks could deteriorate the performance of datastores and service that use them. Mark harddisk as flash disks only if you are certain that those disks are flash disks.

Now the Harddisk is displaying as “Flash” under device type. You can add this Flash disk as cache tier for Hybrid vSAN cluster and either cache or capacity tier for All-Flash VSAN cluster.

You can add that disk as Flash disk for the vSAN disk group. You can also have the option to mark the same disk back as HDD. Once the disk is marked as flash. You will get icon HDD option to mark it back as HDD.

That’s it. We are done with marking the hard disk as Flash disk (SSD). I hope this is informative for you. Thanks for Reading!!!. Be social and share it with social media.

]]>http://www.vmwarearena.com/how-to-mark-harddisk-as-flash-disk-for-vsan-disk-group/How to Create a VM Clone from a Snapshot in VMware Workstationhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/vmwarearena/~3/aBG0iWGa-w0/
Wed, 14 Feb 2018 04:39:46 +0000http://www.vmwarearena.com/?p=5988VMware Snapshots and Clone makes administrators life easy. Think about old typical Physical servers and its software upgrade or security patching. If anything corrupted during the patching or upgrade, Your day will be screwed up with restoring your server from tape back. Can’t even imagine now rite. VMware Simplified the server operations a lot. Just […]

]]>VMware Snapshots and Clone makes administrators life easy. Think about old typical Physical servers and its software upgrade or security patching. If anything corrupted during the patching or upgrade, Your day will be screwed up with restoring your server from tape back. Can’t even imagine now rite. VMware Simplified the server operations a lot. Just take a VM snapshot before making any changes to your virtual machine. It allows you to revert back to the state where virtual machine was before the changes in just a single click. I have been asked by OS support team many times that “can we Create a VM Clone from a Snapshot”. I said no multiple times because we don’t have that option in vSphere. You can create a VM clone from a Snapshot and this option is available with Horizon View Composer via linked Clones and in VMware Workstation. In this article, I will cover how to Create a VM clone from a Snapshot in VMware Workstation. Take a look at the article to understand the difference between Clone and Snapshot.

There may be multiple scenarios such as you worked on installing or Configuring some software or performing multiple changes to your virtual machine and you have taken a snapshot prior to each of the changes. Once your testing is completed, you may need to covert a particular state of the virtual machine as a New virtual machine to begin with the actual deployments. This option of clone a New VM from Snapshot will help you to achieve this.

How to Create a VM Clone from a Snapshot in VMware Workstation

I have a virtual machine called “dc01” running in VMware Workstation. I have multiple test cases on the virtual machine and took multiple snapshots.

Please Note: You need to power off the virtual machine before taking the snapshot if you have the plan to clone it as a new VM from that snapshot.

VMware Workstation will not allow you to make a clone of a virtual machine or Snapshot that is powered on or Suspended state. If I try to Clone a virtual machine from Snapshot which was taken when the virtual machine was powered on. It throws the below error.

Select the Snapshot Which you want to Clone as a New VM. You can only select the VM snapshot which was taken when VM is in the Powered off state.

I took 2 Snapshots ‘Test Case 4 and Test Case 5″ when VM was in powered off state and remaining 5 snapshots are taken when VM is in Powered on state. I have selected the Test Case 4 Snapshot and click on Clone option.

Click Next to continue with Clone Virtual Machine Wizard.

Select the Snapshots from the drop-down under existing Snapshot (Powered off Only) option. It only lists 2 snapshots which were taken when the virtual machine was in the powered off state. Click Next.

Select the Clone Type either Linked Clone or Full Clone. Click Next.

Linked Clone: A linked Clone is a reference to the original virtual machine and requires less disk space for storage. However, it cannot run without access to the original virtual machine. If you have deleted the old virtual machine, Cloned VM using linked clone option will be inaccessible.

Full Clone: A Full clone is a complete copy of the original virtual machine at its current state. This virtual machine is fully independent but requires more disk space.

Type the virtual machine name and location to store. Click Finish.

Clone of the virtual machine from the snapshot is started.

Clone operation from the snapshot is completed. Click Close.

New Cloned virtual machine called “TestCase 4” is created from the snapshot of the virtual machine.

That’s it. we are done. I hope this is informative for you. Thanks for Reading!!!. Be social and share it with social media, if you feel worth sharing it.